Sausalito Audio History So Far · Sausalito Audio. Sausalito Audio is a small audio consulting and licensing firm based in Novato, CA. It’s predecessor company, Sausalito Audio

61-C Galli Dr., Novato, CA 94949 415.883.8040

Sausalito Audio History So Far

By Manny LaCarrubba


“Hi!” I’m Manny LaCarrubba, principle engineer and co-founder of Sausalito Audio. Sausalito Audio is a small audio consulting and licensing firm based in Novato, CA. It’s predecessor company, Sausalito Audio Works, had its humble beginnings in my garage in Sausalito, California - hence the name.

That’s me working in my Sausalito, CA garage around 1994.

I became interested in loudspeakers while enrolled in the Tonmeister Studies program at SUNY Fredonia. There program director David Moulton and physics professor Michael Ferralli were working on the problem of narrowing directivity with increasing frequency in conventional loudspeaker design.


Manny & Dave around 1991. Dave and I are good friends and business partners to this day. David is now semi-‐

retired.

Moulton and Ferralli patented a waveguide called the Ferrallipse. It was two bisected ellipsoids that shared a common focal point. Tweeters were mounted facing inward at the outer focal points. All this aroused my interest in speaker design and I worked with this waveguide after graduating and moving to San Francisco, California.

A Ferrallipse speaker built around 1989. I have no idea what landfill that speaker is in now, but that plant is hanging in my living room! The tweeters are mounted on brackets on the sides and point into the waveguide.


While the Ferrallipse did have a wide high frequency dispersion characteristic, the overall frequency response was, shall we say, “less than spectacular”. Which led to this version of the Ferrallipse.

The cover plate has the tweeters mounted on it along with a healthy amount of absorptive material. While this was much improved over the original version, the performance was still less than excellent. “Yes,” that’s cow’s hide. The

client’s cat LOVED these!

Getting two tweeters to add in phase with the Ferralipse waveguide was proving to be impossible, so late one night in front of my Mac SE with all of 1mb of RAM running MacDraft, I came up with what became known as Acoustic Lens Technology or ALT.


The first ALT speaker built around 1994. This speaker sounded remarkably good!

ALT has extraordinarily wide high frequency dispersion without sacrificing flat frequency response. Of course, if one waveguide was good, two might be better…

The first dual ALT speaker in about 1996.


… and better is was! This speaker was capable of superior performance. The waveguides were handmade out of kids modeling clay (plasticine) and baked in the oven. (BTW, from the late eighties through 1997, while all this development work was being done, I was working as a recording engineer and Chief Engineer at the famous Plant Recording Studios in Sausaltio.)

I had a local metal shop make me a jig to help form the plasticine. It was seriously hard work making those things!

(FYI, I don’t make speakers with my shirt off anymore.)

Testing the first dual ALT configuration in my Sausalito garage. circa 1995

As a result of these speakers and the patent behind them, Sausalito Audio Works got the attention of Bang & Olufsen of Denmark. B&O


licensed from us and ultimately purchased the intellectual property. The first commercially produced ALT speaker was the outstanding Beolab 5. This speaker was a four-way design, had a built-in subwoofer and 2500W of power. It was fully digital with a moving microphone built in. It was the world’s first self-calibrating loudspeaker.

The Bang & Olufsen Beolab 5 in production from 2002 through 2015. I would estimate that B&O sold over 35,000

units likely making it the most successful speaker in its class ever produced.

After the IP sale to B&O, Sausalito Audio Works was wound up and Sausalito Audio was born. We spent a few years developing in-wall and in-ceiling speakers but went into hibernation after the Great Recession. My wife, who is a singer/songwriter, and I had played around with sound reinforcement applications for these wide dispersion waveguides in the past. I decided to get serious about it in 2011. This led to the development of a second-generation wide dispersion waveguide we call the Conic Section Array or CSA.


This is the first CSA loudspeaker ever built. Made for sound reinforcement use, it is a dual 10" 2 1/2-‐way design

using a 1” throat compression driver.

The CSA patent issued in 2015. The PA speaker worked so well and sounded so good that two associates and I formed Grimani Systems LLC to commercialize the CSA for private screening room/cinema use.


The top-‐of-‐the-‐line Grimani Systems Alpha loudspeaker is a 3-‐way, high SPL, 80Hz design made to hang on the baffle wall behind a cinema screen. This speaker is comparable to (and superior than most) the world’s very best

cone and dome loudspeaker yet can fill a 200-‐seat auditorium.

Thanks for taking this little trip down memory lane with me! Please get in touch with questions and comments.

A slightly more recent picture of me.


* The picture on the cover page is of The Garden – a multi-channel mix room at the Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito, CA. The room was completed in 1999 and had 5 large Acoustic Lens Technology main monitors custom designed by me.

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Sausalito Audio History So Far · Sausalito Audio. Sausalito Audio is a small audio consulting and licensing firm based in Novato, CA. It’s predecessor company, Sausalito Audio